Welcome Message

Hello my dear reader,

Welcome to my blog, which is dedicated to Cisco technologies. On its pages we will talk about the limitless world of telephony and networking.

We will focus mostly on Cisco collaboration solutions and technologies. These are IP PBX based on Cisco Unified Communications Manager and Cisco Unified Communications Manager Express, Cisco contact centers, Cisco Voice Gateways, etc. Also, I will introduce you the education news: Cisco authorized courses, my own developed training programs, our upcoming events, online learning.

If you have any questions regarding my posts, job or activities, please feel free to ask your questions. I will try to answer them when I have time.

If you are satisfied with the content of my blog, isn’t that worth a beer or coffee? Donations help me to continue supporting the blog and creating new posts here — things for which I spend hours of my free time! Thank you very much!

Sincerely, Dmytro Benda

Friday, December 22, 2023

Enabling chat between the Supervisor and the Agents (Cisco Webex Contact Center)

In this short post I will explain you how to fix the issue, when the Supervisors can't send a text message to one of the monitored agents in Cisco Webex Contact Center. The supervisor complains, the he doesn't see the internal chat icon in his desktop. Here is an example of such a situation:

Saturday, December 2, 2023

Digital Channels are not enabled in the Agent Desktop (Cisco Webex Contact Center)

The problem description: Agents complain that when they login to their Webex Contact Center desktops, they can't use the digital channels like Chat, Email, Messengers, SMS, etc. And of course they do not therefore receive any inbound contact from digital channels. 

Read this post and you will know how to fix it. 

Monday, March 20, 2023

IVR Menu with Dial an Extension Option (Cisco Webex Contact Center)

Sometimes, when you develop an IVR application, there can be a challenge of adding Dial an Extension option to a voice menu; i.e you have to do something like this in your menu:

"If you want to do option1, press 1; if you want to do option2, press 2; if you know the extension number of the employee, please dial it now"

What will be the best way to approach this? In UCCE \ PCCE environment you can do it in your CVP Call Studio application using Form and Decision Elements. But what about Cisco Webex Contact Center? The scripting is totally different in Webex Contact Center, and there is no Activity (element) in the Call Flow similar to Form in Studio. After reading this post you will see that it is not a problem at all. 

Friday, March 17, 2023

Why internal calls dialed by extensions fail in Cisco Webex Calling

Today I am going to share with you, my dear readers, some experience of working with Cisco cloud telephony - Cisco Webex Calling. One of my customers received his own tenant in Webex Calling and started using it. So, they received access to Webex Control Hub, they configured some users with extensions for testing, etc. The users could normally login to Webex Application with their accounts and see their extensions. 

However, they were surprised to discover that when they try to make an internal call from Webex App to Webex App and dial extensions of each other, the call just fails. They can hear the message from Webex Annunciator like ""We're sorry, but your call can not be competed at this time..." This not what our customer expected from the newest cloud telephony system, right? ))) Let me tell you, how it was solved.

Monday, October 31, 2022

Create Generated Prompt and Create Container Prompt Steps in UCCX Scripts

In many UCCX scripts a developer can meet a task to spell or pronounce some phrases from intermediate variables whose values are dynamically determined based on runtime script information. For example, the customer enters his information like his credit card number or zip code etc. and the script must confirm it by spelling this value back to the caller. Very often these spoken phrases should be concatenated with other existing prompts (wav-files). There are some interesting steps in the UCCX script editor such as Create Generated Prompt step and Create Container Prompt step. Let's see how they can help you to spell string values and concatenate prompts. 

Thursday, October 20, 2022

Saving Information to a Text File in UCCX Repository

Being a Cisco Instructor, I often receive practical questions from my students and customers about some configurations of Cisco UC products. Many scenarios are not clearly described in Cisco documentation and therefore can be found only during real work with Cisco equipment and products. One of these question was related to UCCX. Our customer wanted to save some information like date, time, calling number, etc. in a text file. Actually, the best choice to keep such data is a Database of course, but for some reasons they preferred to save all this in txt format. It is not a problem to do it, but their case was a bit complicated, because they want to update the content of the file after each call and add new rows there with new data. I created a demo UCCX script with such functionality for them and tested it in UCCX 12.5. And in this post we are going to discuss it. 

Sunday, October 16, 2022

Understanding Cisco Voice Gateways - Part 4. Digital Voice Ports

In the previous parts of our Cisco Voice Gateway story we identified what analog voice ports are. Also we talked about different types of analog supervisory signaling. Now let's see how we can use our Cisco voice gateways with digital lines such as T1, E1 and BRI. These types of connection are still widely available worldwide. This post maps out the various digital interfaces and explains the differences between them.

Tuesday, October 11, 2022

Understanding Cisco Voice Gateways - Part 3. Loop-start and Ground-start Signaling (FXS and FXO Ports)

Now you already know what Cisco Voice Gateways are and which types of analog voice ports they can use. It is time to discuss signaling processes on FXO and FXS ports. As it was shown earlier, voice ports on routers and gateways physically connect them to telephony devices such as telephones, fax machines, PBXs, and PSTN CO switches. These devices may use any of several types of signaling interfaces to generate information about on-hook status, ringing, and line seizure. Traditional two wired FXS and FXO voice ports typically use so called Loop-Start and Ground-Start supervisory signaling. I am going to explain how these types signaling work in the in the next few paragraphs.

Thursday, September 29, 2022

Voice and DTMF input in UCCX Script with Nuance ASR

Some days ago I helped one guy to solve his problem with the voice menu in his UCCX script. He had UCCX integrates with Nuance ASR and he was asked to provide a menu with both voice and DTMF input in his UCCX Script. Let me show you, how it can be configured. 

Sunday, September 25, 2022

Pinging Multiple IP addresses with Python

Recently, we talked with you about using Python for network programming. Let me share you an simple example of a Python script, which helps me a lot in my work. Before every course the trainers have to check the lab operation. The next week I will deliver the CCEA (Cisco Contact Center Enterprise Administration) course to seven students, and every student will use his individual lab pod. In the pod there are 13 virtual machines and hardware devices. Before we start the course I have to be sure that all VM are accessible through the network, so I have to connect to every lab pod and ping all the VMs and devices there. Of course, I can do it manually, however, it is time consuming. Let's use Python to automate this and save our time.